His conception of God is of the being responsible for suffering and death whom Man should and must upbraid for this. His poem in imitation of Housman "A.E.H.", is set on a battlefield at night, after all of the wounded have died:

Past the standards rent and muddied, Past the careless heaps of slain, Stalks a redcoat who, unbloodied, Weeps with fury, not from pain

… who nightlong curses Wounds imagined more than seen, Who in level tones rehearses What the fact of wounds must mean.

One could quote plenty more in this line. There is the savage poem addressed to Jesus, "New Approach Needed", that starts:

Should you revisit us, Stay a little longer, And get to know the place. Experience hunger, Madness, disease and war. You heard about them, true, The last time you came here; It's different having them.

Among the novels, The Anti Death League is a prolonged and furious attack on God and the necessity of suffering (which also contains some of his sweetest writing about love); while The Green Man, a wonderful genre experiment, is a ghost story in which God appears, as a young man who is the personification of death, teasing, cruel, and above all omnipotent: you can't imagine what a temptation it is, He says at one stage, to drop a live dinosaur, just a small one, into Leicester Square. But The Green Man is the work of an older, sadder, and rather drunker author. The narrator realises at the end that – though he may never be free of God – he might, after death, be free of himself, and feels at this the pull of a weak thread of hope. I don't think there has ever been a more negative approach to heaven, here considered solely as an alternative to hell.

Amis, for all his pessimism, and the growing, brutal despair of his later years still seems to have been a fundamental optimist. People who knew him, even ex-wives, remember him as a tremendous source of joy. He could be, what he called his friend Bob Conquest, a tremendous advertisement for life. "Nice things are better than nasty things" he wrote, and he took this as a programme of action – so let's go out and get nice things – rather than a reflection on the inevitability of nasty things as it might strike a more melancholy cove.

But then I am a melancholy type, and I can't help thinking that the young man who would entirely have endorsed the demand that pretty women should stop worrying and enjoy life ended up writing The Old Devils (and Ending Up). This isn't an argument against atheism. It's an argument for the reality of those nasty things for which God served him as an explanation and an object of blame. From Amis's books, if not from his life, we can learn how far courage and service to their art can help good writers to transcend them.

Disbandment has come to us As it comes to all who grow old;Demobilised now, we faceWhat we faced when we first enrolled.Stand still in the middle rank!See you show them a touch of pride! – Left-right, left-right, bags of swank –On the one-man pass-out parade.